The initiative covers several important pain points customers have regarding
storage at a time when unstructured data, such as e-mail, is growing
exponentially. These focus areas include: Online disk backup and recovery;
disaster recovery; database testing and reporting; and data warehouses.

Ron Weiss, director of product management for high availability and storage
management said Oracle is applying Database 10g to storage in a
continuation of the company's efforts to help customers cut costs in data
centers.

"We learned a lot in doing the grid at the server level and what we're
trying to make happen is the same kind of thing at the storage level," Weiss
told internetnews.com.

Weiss said Oracle customers such as Amazon, which has built a large data
warehouse using modular storage on Oracle databases, had a jump on the
low-cost play before Oracle. Oracle has used the strategy for its own
Collaboration Suite.

More broadly, Weiss said the storage plan dovetails with Oracle's
information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy, in which data is
prioritized and placed on the most appropriate storage gear. EMC, IBM , HP and others are all heading down similar paths for data
management.

Oracle unveiled
its ILM plans and enterprise content management software and other products
last week at its OpenWorld show in San Francisco.

The Redwood Shores, Calif., company also
announced at the show a technology and marketing deal with virtualization provider
VMware. The vendors are working to make VMware a standard development
platform for Oracle server software.